ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100400004-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 15, 2007
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: October 13, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
DATE October 13,.1982 10:30 A.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
CHARLIE ROSE: Admiral Stansfield Turner has had a
record of extraordinary accomplishment in his life. He was a
brilliant scholar, a Rhodes scholar. He went on to become an
admiral in the Navy. President Carter appointed him as Director
of the CIA.
In 1981, January 20th, you left government to become a
private citizen and a consultant. When you looked at the world
in 1981, January, how did you size it up? What were the relative
sensitive points? How were we doing in contrast to the Soviets
and the Chinese?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think, Charlie, that one of the major
factors was the Third World, the countries in Latin America,
Africa, Asia, were becoming increasingly important to this
country. We had focused our intelligence, much of our foreign
policy for many years almost exclusively on the Soviet Union and
its activities. We have to begin shifting our.attention.
Secondly, there were problems developing, even then,
with our allies. We weren't paying enough attention to their
attitudes and outlooks. The Europeans in particular. And that's
become worse since 1981. We need, I believe, in the future to
pay more attention to consulting with, understanding, and working
closely with our allies if we're going to keep those
relationships.
I think those are two of the principal trends.
ROSE: I want to come to the relationship with the
allies and the pipeline decision. But first the Soviet Union.
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There seems to be an ongoing debate, and the Reagan
Administration certainly believes that we have not been as strong
in defense as we ought to be, and therefore they're spending a
lot of our budget appropriations for raising the level of
armaments in this government.
How did you measure the contrast between the relative
military power of the Soviet Union and the United States in 1981?
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's a very difficult and complex
question which I would want to break into three phases. You have
three reasons in the United States for having military power.
The first is to deter nuclear attack on our country. And I
believe our posture here vis-a-vis the Soviet Union is quite
good.
Secondly, you have to worry about the possibility of a
major conventional war breaking out with the Soviets, in Europe
primarily. Here I think our condition is satisfactory but
deteriorating.
Thirdly, we keep military force to intervene in remote
areas of the world, like the British had to in the Falklands,
like we are concerned in recent years about the Persian Gulf and
our oil supplies. And here I think our capability, which is not
measured directly against the Soviet Union, but against wherever
we might have to fight, is only marginal. I don't think we've
emphasized that enough in recent years.
ROSE: How do you measure the Russian mind? What did
you know, sitting there at Langley, with all of the data you had,
with all of the information, the one person who was absorbing
everything we knew about the Soviets? What are their intentions?
How do you separate the myth from the reality? What do they
want? What kinds of demands are being made on the Soviet
leadership?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, it's very difficult because it's
such a different society than ours. The only thing I would like
to say, though, is that I believe we make a bigger effort to
understand the Soviets, and do a better job at it, than they do
of understanding us. And that's one of the big dangers in the
world today, that they really don't understand the United States
at the leadership level in the Soviet Union.
ROSE: Why not?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Because they have a very different
culture, they have a very different outlook on life, and they so
restrict freedom of the press, they so restrict contact between
their people and the rest of the world. And that's one of the
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great strengths that we have on our side.
ROSE: But they have had an ambassador who's been here
longer than any other ambassador in the United States, clearly a
watcher of the United States. Is his assumptions about us wrong?
ROSE: Are they wrong?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Mr. Dobrynin must understand the United
States reasonably well. Mr. Gromyko, the Foreign Minister, who's
been in office longer than most of us can remember, must
understand us reasonably well.
I think, though, they have a great deal of difficulty --
and we had some evidence of this -- in getting through to the top
leadership and really making their case.
You never should forget the fact that it's a
totalitarian society over there.
Now, I frequently had to go to President Carter and tell
unpleasant things or tell him things that he didn't want to hear.
ROSE: What was the most unpleasant you ever told him?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I don't think I want to get into
that in specifics. But there were times when my analysis of what
was happening in a foreign country was quite different than where
he wanted us to go, in a sense. So I just had to tell it to him
as I saw it. Now, I was always with a little bit of trepidation
when you go to the President of the United States and tell him
bad news. But I never worried that I would lose my head,
literally. And I think in the Soviet Union you have to be
concerned about that. I think there's a lot of trepidation about
telling bad news in a totalitarian society.
ROSE: Let's turn that around. The head of the KGB,
Yuri Andropov, if I'm pronouncing it correctly,...
ROSE: ...is frequently rumored as the next -- as the
successor to Leonid Brezhnev. What did you know about Andropov?
What kind of man is he? What kind of family does he have? How
does he feel about U.S.-Soviet relationships?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think Andropov is considered to be a
more moderate person in the Soviet Union. I think he does not
understand the United States. He has never been over here. He
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has not traveled widely. He's a very capable bureaucrat. He
managed the KGB well, from all that we could see. But I wouldn't
want to speculate that he's really going to be the successor.
Among other things, you always have to remember that if
you want to be the successor in the Soviet Union, the last thing
you should do is let your...
ROSE: Announce that you're being a successor.
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's right. You see, in a country
where there is no established procedure for changing the top,
there's no term of office -- I mean Mr. Brezhnev does not admit
that he's going to leave, ever. So when somebody comes along and
appears to be a candidate to replace him, that's the best way to
get your head cut off.
ROSE: We've got to go to the break for a second. But
let's stay with Brezhnev for a second.d
What did you know about his health, and what kind of
information did you have? That's not the kind of information you
can get from a satellite. It's not like national security
information about military armaments. Did you know, did you have
people inside that were telling you the quality of his health and
whether he was going to die?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Now, Charlie, you don't really expect
me to answer that question.
ROSE: But I thought I'd ask.
ADMIRAL TURNER: But I think you can tell the health of
foreign leaders quite well, regardless of whether you have people
on the inside. That helps if you have it, in many cases. But
they make enough public appearances, and that you then take a
qualified doctor and a qualified psychologist and you analyze all
of the appearances, the symptoms that you can detect from what
they do in public, and you can come up with a pretty good
estimate. And we have some marvelous doctors, some marvelous
psychologists at the Central Intelligence Agency who do
evaluations of foreign leaders.
President Carter, in particular, found those very, very
helpful to him when...
ROSE: But that's interesting. Because what would the
Soviets have thought when President Carter collapsed at Camp
David while running in the marathon that he was running in up
there? What kind of information might that have signaled, might
that have sent to them?
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When we come back, I want to talk about the relative
strengths of the KGB, the CIA, the Israeli intelligence, and how
you see things changing as we enter the third year of the '8Os.
We're with Admiral Stansfield Turner, former CIA
Director, former admiral, former Rhodes scholar, a man with a
keen insight into how the world shapes up in 1982.
ROSE: Let's talk about intelligence a little bit in the
'80s. There are constant comparisons between the KGB and the
CIA. How do you make that comparison? Are we doing better? Are
they doing better? Is their technology better? Do they have
more because we're an open society and they're a closed society?
Does that make it easier for them, and therefore they have more
data on us than we do on them?
ADMIRAL TURNER: First, on the technical side, we're way
ahead of them.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Satellites and listening systems and
all other kinds of techniques for collecting information
clandestinely. This country has this marvelous industrial base
of technology which is put on into our intelligence apparatus,
and it's very good. We're well ahead.
Secondly, though, you also collect information by the
use of spies, human agents. Here, the Soviets have many more
than we do. I'm not sure just why they do, because we put it all
in our magazines and newspapers and television shows.
But I don't think they're necessarily any better at it
than we. We've watched some pretty clumsy human intelligence
operations on their part. But it's really impossible to give you
a weighted comparison.
But thirdly, and most importantly, in a closed
totalitarian society, doing good analysis of those facts that are
obtained by human or technical means of collecting information is
much more difficult than it is in our open society. Again back
to something we talked about earlier. If you come up with the
wrong conclusion in the Soviet Union, you may not be able even to
present it to anybody.
ROSE: We have -- has the role of the spy, the human
contact, the person who is meeting with someone in the Soviet
Union and someone who's meeting with a traitor in our country,
has that role diminished with the rapid increase of the
technology?
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ADMIRAL TURNER: No, it has not diminished, but it has
changed radically. And many people, even in the intelligence
world, don't quite understand that, Charlie.
You see, it used to be that when you needed some
information you sent a spy out to get it. Today you say, "I want
that information." The best way to get it without running any
risk for our country is with a satellite or with some technical
system. And therefore you try that first. And then that narrows
down the field of what you send the spy to get. So you focus
your spy more precisely.
Let me give you an example. Let's say we find there's a
new building on the outskirts of the capital of Country X. So we
have our satellite take pictures of this building and we decide,
"Well, we want to know what that big factory is associated with."
So we turn the listening people who listen to radio signals
loose and we say, "Tell us what that factory is communicating
with in the capital." And we find out it's communicating with
the Ministry of Nuclear Matters. Then we hire a spy and we say,
"You get in that ministry and find out if it's over here in the
nuclear weapons department or over here in the nuclear power
plant department.
ROSE: Okay.
ADMIRAL TURNER: So the spy is still critical, 'cause
you couldn't get that much any other way. But you focus him.
You see what I mean? You make him much more productive.
ROSE: How do you hire him? How does that process work?
I mean do you have -- you know, take me through that process of
how do you -- do you just -- what do you do?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, you have to look all over the
world for the right kind of people. It's a dragnet operation.
Then you have to sound them out. And when you find somebody who
is receptive to getting you the kind of information you want and
who has, you believe, access to that kind of information, you do
what we call -- you pitch them. You make the pitch to see if
they will join with us. Some do join with us for money. Some
join with us for patriotism. They realize we have a better
ideology, a better grip on life than do the Soviets or other
countries and they want to help us.
Then, Charlie, you've got a very difficult decision. Is
this man or woman for real? Is he really going to work for the
United States, or is he putting us on and going to feed us bad
information and try to get something out of us in return?
ROSE: How do you make that decision?
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ADMIRAL TURNER: Its difficult, very difficult.
But let me go back to those psychologists I mentioned a
while ago. You know, we psychoanalyze those people we engage.
Now, the psychologist, the psychiatrist never sees them or meets
with them. But he takes every bit of information that our people
get about that individual and we turn it over for a psychological
evaluation.
Each one is individual. Each one is tough. And you
never know for sure whether you're right.
ROSE: Is it more -- do we have -- and the reason I ask
this question, I was told by someone who lives in Moscow that
because most Soviet citizens are under such scrutiny, that
person-to-person contact is terribly difficult. You almost have
to exist with drops rather than person-to-person contact. And
if, in fact, we have agents that we have contacted while they
were in service in East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, some of the
satellite countries, once they go back to the Soviet Union we
really limit -- almost no contact, because we don't want to risk
discovery. We know how closely they're watched.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Now you really want to know all the
details of the inside spying operation.
Let me just say that modern techniques of surveillance,
using a lot of this technical equipment, are such that it's
increasingly risky to conduct that kind of clandestine operation
in a lot of countries, not just in the Soviet Union. Even what
we call Third World countries are becoming more and more
sophisticated.
So, the world of human intelligence not only is
different today because you focus it differently, but you've got
to be even more skilled today because it is more difficult.
ROSE: When you look for someone as a potential
undercover operative, are there special qualities that those
psychologists tell you are essential in someone that can be
successful at that kind of task?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I don't think you can generalize that,
no. Because people are motivated for all sorts of different
reasons. As I said, some are really patriotic, in the sense that
they want to work for us because they believe in what we stand
for. Some want revenge. They've been mistreated by somebody or
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some country. Others want money.
ROSE: Admiral Stansfield Turner talking about spying.d
When we come back I want to ask about Iran, a subject
that caused enormous consternation in this country, and some
allegations that the CIA had failed us.
ROSE: Admiral Stansfield Turner, Iran. You look at what
happened there, and I'm sure President Carter would have expected
the CIA to have given him more information and to have known that
the possibility of all of those anti-Shah forces coalescing and
being able to overthrow the Shah. He must have asked you how
come you didn't know.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Charlie, hindsight is a great thing.
It's a great thing in any profession, intelligence or television
or business. In this case, when you look back, there weren't
many people on television or the newspapers or business or
academia who were predicting in 1978 that the Shah would not be
around very long in 1979.
ROSE: But it was not their responsibility to have the
kind of information that you had.
ADMIRAL TURNER: We should have done better, and we
didn't make that prediction either.
ROSE: Why didn't we?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Because we made one assumption that
proved to be false. We recognized there was a good bit of
ferment, discontent inside Iran. But we assumed that the Shah
would take care of that when the time came. Unfortunately, we
thought he would take care of it with strong police or military
power. Now, he had that power. There was no reason that he
could not have suppressed those uprisings if he had really wanted
to and been bloodthirsty enough to do so.
ROSE: Why didn't he do it?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I don't think you or I will ever know.
One hypothesis is that he was too sick a man. The other, perhaps
more likely, in my view, is that he had so lost touch with his
own country that he didn't realize how serious these uprisings
were until it was so late that it would have been very, very
bloody.
ROSE: And he would bow out rather than too...
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ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, he decided to temporize and try
to hang on by other means than actually going out in the streets
and beating people up.
So we made a bad call, that we thought...
ROSE: And the repercussions are incredible.
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's true. But don't judge your
nation's intelligence capabilities too much on whether it
predicts immediate events. The question is, are you predicting
long-term trends?
First of all, the government can't do a great deal in
the short run. Even if in September-October 1978 we'd have said
the Shah is a goner, there was a limited amount the United States
could have done. It should have been three, four or five years
ahead of that that we should have been doing a better job in
intelligence, elsewhere in our country, even, in sensing that
there was an undercurrent of difficulty there and predicting that
it might be a problem.
ROSE: That suggests, then, that the operatives in all
of those countries, whether Third World or in the Middle East, or
wherever, ought to be spending a lot of time staying in touch
with opposition forces. And one of the allegations was, at the
time, that we did not do that, that our embassy and our CIA
operatives, frequently in the same building, were not in fact in
touch with the disparate elements.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, we just talked a minute ago about
the problems of keeping contact with people in countries where
they have a strong police force, a strong surveillance capability
in their secret police. So there are great risks, even more in a
friendly country, like Iran, than in an unfriendly country, like
the Soviet Union, to getting caught being in contact with
subversive people, from the government's point of view.
I don't want to acknowledge what you've alleged, because
it wasn't quite that way.
ROSE: You've heard the allegation before.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I've heard the allegation once or
ROSE: How do you measure the Israeli intelligence, the
ADMIRAL TURNER: The Mosad is good.
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ROSE: They're, some say, the best in the world.
ADMIRAL TURNER: No. It may be very good in its limited
sphere. But there are only two intelligence services that are
worldwide in capability, the KGB in the Soviet Union and the
American intelligence community centered around the CIA.
ROSE: And the CIA is every bit as good as the KGB?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think so. At least as good as the
But, you see, only we have these expensive satellites.
Only we can afford the total worldwide coverage. A Mosad, a
British intelligence can be very good in certain specialties.
But if you look at Mosad's record in this recent war, why were
the Israelis so terribly surprised that there were vast
stockpiles of munitions in Lebanon? They seemed to be
overwhelmed by that when they found it.
ROSE: Admiral Stansfield Turner.
ROSE: If this was your last lecture, what would you
want to warn America about? What is the message that sort of is
brimming inside of you to say, "This is what concerns me most
about the future of this Republic"?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Charlie, we have to learn to take a
longer-term, more-global view of things. We do too much on a
superficial way, and particularly on -- I'm sorry to say -- on
television. We get the evening news, really, in about six or
seven minutes. And then we go to a lot of amusing things. The
world is much more complex.
We have to look at where the United States can help out
and fit in in a much longer-term perspective.
ROSE: And be more sensitive to our allies.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And be more sensitive to our allies and
to people in the Third World.
ROSE: I thank you, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Much
success in private business and consulting. You're now working
for NBC, as I understand it.
ADMIRAL TURNER: From time to time.
ROSE: We thank you for sharing this time with us.
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